Chapter 13: Tea and Consequences

Sato had come to her two days after their arrival in San Francisco.

She appeared at the door of Midori’s dressing room in the early morning with the contained expression of a woman who had information and had decided it was her duty to deliver it. She bowed. Then she spoke in Japanese, quietly and completely, the way a trusted servant delivered things that needed to be heard.

Midori listened without interrupting.

Sato told her about Kathleen Marie Simpson. A widow, thirty two, from a reasonably established San Francisco family. She had set her intentions toward Reggie Hemming approximately eighteen months ago with the focused determination of a woman who considered him a reasonable and attainable prospect. She had been a regular presence at social events he attended. She had cultivated friendships with his business associates’ wives for the specific purpose of proximity.

He had come home with a wife instead.

Midori looked at her reflection in the dressing mirror for a moment after Sato finished.

“Thank you,” she said. In Japanese. “That will be all.”

Sato bowed and withdrew.

Midori picked up her hairbrush and resumed the morning’s routine with the unhurried calm of a woman who had filed the information away in the appropriate place and would retrieve it at the appropriate time.

She went to Nakayima six weeks later.

There was other business — Black Corridor matters, an update on the Livingston file. But at the end of the meeting when Reggie had stepped out to examine a new shipment and it was just Midori and Nakayima in the back room, she set down her tea cup.

“There is one more thing,” she said.

She described what she needed. Precisely. A single operative. A specific address. General intelligence on the household — correspondence, documents, anything that revealed the nature of the occupant’s intentions toward her husband.

Nakayima listened. His face gave nothing.

“Discreet,” Midori said. “Nothing disturbed. Nothing taken unless it is small enough to go unnoticed for at least twenty four hours.”

“When?” Nakayima said.

She named a date. The night before a tea she was planning.

He nodded once. The matter was concluded.

The operative returned the following evening through the back door of the Pacific Heights house. He delivered a small wrapped package to Sato who brought it to Midori in the parlor.

Midori unwrapped it.

She looked at what was in her hands for a long moment.

The ivory was very white. The engraving was very clear.

Reginald Hemming.

Midori’s composure, which had survived the collapse of the Shogunate, a checkpoint confronted by armed soldiers, six weeks on the Pacific, and the full social artillery of San Francisco society, took a brief and unprecedented pause.

Then she wrapped it carefully in its silk. Set it in the lacquered box on the side table. Closed the lid.

She sat for a moment looking at the closed box.

Then she picked up her correspondence and finished her letters.

Tomorrow at three o’clock Kathleen Marie Simpson would come to tea.

She hadn’t even needed a plan. The universe had provided one.

The invitation had arrived on rice paper in Midori’s handwriting, English on one side, Japanese characters on the other, exactly like all her invitations. Kathleen received it on a Tuesday morning and spent considerable time deciding what it meant before concluding that it meant exactly what it said and that declining would look like exactly what it was.

She arrived on Thursday at three o’clock in a visiting dress of considerable expense and the carefully assembled confidence of a woman who had decided she had nothing to be nervous about.

Thomas showed her in. The genkan gave her a moment’s pause. She looked at the pebbled floor and the low bench and the wooden step and the single ikebana arrangement on its stand. She looked at Thomas.

Thomas looked back with the pleasant neutrality of a man who had been doing this long enough to find it entertaining.

She removed her shoes.

Sato led her through the parlor — she took it in with the quick assessing eye of a woman who had been inside every significant house in Pacific Heights and had never seen anything like this one — and out to the rear garden where Midori had arranged tea beside the koi pond.

The afternoon light came through the maple at the garden’s edge and made patterns on the stones. The koi moved in their slow gold and red procession through the water. The bay was visible beyond the garden wall, grey and vast and entirely indifferent to Kathleen Marie Simpson’s visiting dress.